Where is the Real Value in SEO?
-
Interesting topic and would love to hear some thoughts. How do you justify SEO, measure results, etc etc
-
Measuring SEO effectiveness can be done a number of ways, but it largely depends on the scale of the change that is being targeted. If you are looking for a 5% increase in traffic, it's often hard to attribute such change to a particular SEO effort. However, if you are looking for a 10X increase, it is usually pretty clear whether your efforts hit the mark, or missed it in a big way.
-
John Pring hit the nail square on the head. If you don't increase sales who really cares if you increased rankings. Many SEO companies use Rankings as a measure of success. While it is one factor if that is how they want to be paid......run! An hide!
-
Just answered a similar question on Quora:
SEO is marketing.
SEO is the practice of making things built by humans more accessible and more consumable by other humans and by robots.
As long as search engines exist and are_ the most common way people search for what they want and need_, search engine optimization will absolutely be worth the investment and_ will probably be worth substantially more than the investment._
Measuring the Results
_"The most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable, but successful management must nevertheless take account of them." _ http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/social-roi-control.html
Most of the time, I measure everything and only report a small percentage of it to a client (what the client is interested in and should absolutely know about). Reporting is usually relevant to what things make a web site's visitors achieve the goals of the site owner(s); and whether or not campaigns were successful.
-
SEO is simply the process of improving search engine rankings for keyphrases related to a business - ranking a site well for strong keyphrases will almost certainly increase relevant traffic to a website, but if you're only focused on rankings then you're not necessarily going to improve sales and conversions, which is the ultimate goal.
The real value lies in complete internet marketing campaigns, which encompasses a more holistic approach to growing a business online. If you're only focused on rankings (which far too many SEO companies are), then you're missing the bigger picture, and not only that but if you're focusing all your business solely on referrals from Google, then you can quickly find yourself losing your entire business overnight on the basis of an algorithm update.
The value should come from the combination of lots of internet marketing disciplines, including search engine optimisation, branding, conversion rate optimisation, analytics and insight, usability testing, web design, high quality linkbuilding, social media marketing, online customer services and brand management. A high quality company will look to improve your rankings, increase your referral traffic and improve online brand awareness and consideration amongst online shoppers. Then once the number of people to your website is consistently increasing, the focus will shift to ensuring usability and customer services are of a high quality and utilising CRO (conversion rate optimisation) to improve sales and profit.
Success should be measured ultimately by ROI (return on investment) and sales, but other metrics including traffic, links, domain authority, number of referring sites, bounce rate, conversion rates and search engine rankings will be tracked in order to inform campaign progress and impact, as well as informing future decisions.
-
This is a good question.
Before answering, I would be good to know which perspective your are thinking of.
That of the SEO business/person or that of the customer?
-
winning......
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Seo for my medium.com site
I have my regular site blog at www.Guideyourhealth.org and a blog on www.medium.com, should I try to get back links for my medium articles as well that are on topics not competing with my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BuyKratomPowderInfo0 -
URL Parameters, Forms & SEO
Hi I have some pages on the site which have a quote form, in my site crawl I see these showing as duplicate content - my webmaster says this isn't the case, but I'm not sure. Landing page - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/high-esd-chairs Page with form - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/high-esd-chairs?quote-form - this also somehow has a canonical on it pointing to https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/high-esd-chairs?quote-form Which neither of us have added. I'm thinking we need to get the canonical needs to be updated to https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/high-esd-chairs Is it worth doing this for all these pages or am I worrying about nothing? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
How do I optimize dynamic content for SEO?
Hello, folks! I'm wondering how I optimize a site if it is built on a platform that works based on dynamic content. For example, the page pulls in certain information based on the information it has about the user. Not every user will see the same page. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Geonetric
Lindsey0 -
SEO Priorities for Ecommerce Sites
Hello All! What is the best way to rank SEO tasks by PRIORITY for Ecommerce sites to improve?? It can be quite overwhelming with all the types of projects/tasks needed to improve organic rankings... How would you rank the most CRITICAL tasks to spend the MOST TIME on to the tasks you spend less on. Appreciate your input in advance 🙂 Thank you! Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise0 -
Redirection - Seo trick?
Hi, After analyzing the site I found several Redirections of exact match domains. With different domain name extensions. Is Seo trick? Is the second website which i fond that is using this technique. Can anyone gives more details? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
SEO for eCommerce?
I'm working on a game plan for the on-page optimization for a growing e-commerce site (https://www.boutine.com) and I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with similar projects. Specifically, how to get the most SEO value out of product and category pages. Thanks in advance! -Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boutine0 -
Domain expiration and seo
My domain name is free with my service with yahoo but it expires every year and gets extended automatically as I continue service, how does this impact my seo efforts? I've heard that the search engines prefer sites to expire in 3 years or more? Is this a fact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Are there any SEO Tips before killing a website?
Hey guys, My company acquired another company, and after a couple of months we decided to completely kill their website. I'm not finding any info about SEO best practices for this type of situation. From the "switching domains" and "new sites" articles and blog posts I can extrapolate that I should: 301 redirect their home page to ours Look at specific pages with good authority that relate to our pages and 301 them. Look at the strongest backlinks to their site and try to change them to point to our site. Create a 404 page for the rest of their webpages that tells them that we acquired the company (hopefully with a main menu and search bar) Any other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nrv0